A documentary about how homeless people are being exploited to fight or perform ridiculous stunts for money and beer. One of the stunts is plucking one’s own teeth—I cannot even begin to imagine that.
But wait—can you even start to fathom that some people are profiteering from this arrangement?
Why does this happen? Think Jackass. Absurdity, particularly one that is peppered with violence, has been condoned, lauded, and raised to a pedestal by both the makers of such programmes/movies (by, duh, making it, and making it available to the masses) and the masses (by watching it, some even enjoying it, thereby lending monetary support and publicity e.g by word of mouth for the wide-scale and outright portrayal of absurdity). In short, numbskulls have been supporting idiocy-made-entertainment. For a long time, at that.
The result? Naturally, an imprint in youth’s impressionable minds which instigates them to promote the ideology even further and take it to another level.
The crux of the matter is simple: support it, or fight it. To fight it, we must expunge the very medium that continues to propagate this influence and all the other degrading influences *cough*sex*cough* that go along with it—and we all know too well what that medium is.
[via Smashing Telly]
4 Comments
I sincerely doubt that “expunging” an entire medium is the most effective (or realistic) way of combating the “bumfight” phenomenon (especially considering the fact that one would then be throwing the wheat out with the chaff). Why not work to eliminate poverty?
Tim, thank you for visiting my site and your valuable comment.
My simple question is, had Bumfight’s producers (or any other profiteering producer for that matter) not approached the poor people for the purpose of exploiting them, could the poor people have gotten involved in it at all?
If the answer is ‘no’, then we proceed to ask “Why did the producers exploit these poor people?”
The perpetuation of media that glamorises violence, absurdity, and lewdness only sanctions such values portrayed through Bumfights. If we have a medium that effectively gives a green light to the publicising of such values, then sprouts the producers of such shows as Bumfights and their corresponding massive ‘fan’ base. Also, the producers of Bumfights might have also been tempted and motivated by the possible glittering rewards of (God forbid) making it big themselves in this lucrative medium.
This is not to say that poverty should not be eliminated, but I believe that vices should not be built upon vices, and social problems must be struck at their roots.
Media that corrupts the thinking of the masses should be eliminated. This does not mean eliminating such entire technologies as the television or the Internet, but taking down specific media that blatantly and ubiquitously promote negative values. MTV, champion of the Jackass show and a lewd pseudo-music culture which I feel inappropriate, is a striking case in point.
That said, the elimination of poverty is a more lofty goal, if not just as idealistic as the elimination of, say, MTV. A discussion on eliminating poverty would perhaps require another thread on this site, or even another website on its own.
But in the spirit of Thoreau I say, strike the root.
Ok, this is kind of foolish:
America is fighing a war of choice for oil. All this preaching was not done when they were incinerating iraqis… nor was it done when the israelis were incinerating the lebanese. Chris Rock nailed it when he said “The hypocrisy of our democracy.” The flat, unpleasant truth is that this country in question ( america ) has been constantly @ war since 1945. They have had full democracy, it was not a junta that coerced the people into war. They have fought _wars of choice_ during that whole time. Fix that character flaw first, before you worry about people who were paid to fight each other….
Thank you for the interesting point you raised up, Kevin.
I do not see the opposition to the ongoing war of choice as contradictory to the battle against a culture that glorifies violence. If we can eliminate media that only serves to lull the minds of the people with abject violence and sex, and substitute in media that raises consciousness about the state of the world, there will be more people who will oppose the war. In this sense, changing the minds of people can only be helpful.
That aside, the proper way to fight a country that wages war on others is to fight back. I mean, seriously. If someone consciously and premeditatedly punches you in the face, the most rational and apt thing to do is to punch back — no question about that. We would be so naive to reply: “Can we make peace?” or “Hey, why did you do that? Please, kindly explain.” By the time we get a sufficient reply (and it is often not a convincing one e.g. “WMD in Iraq! Ahhh!”), much damage has already been done. And as it stands now, that means a LOT of damage.
But in a particular tiny red dot in this part of the world, any mention of violence is hastily labeled as radicalism. Start to take some real action, and you are as good as a terrorist, deserving incarceration. They have their principle-equivalent of Gitmo Bay already, to boot.
While I sit comfortably in front of my computer not fighting for the cause of the oppressed, may God punish the perpetrators of evil, and those who put obstacles in the way of fighting them.